Posted
by
timothy
on Tuesday May 24, 2011 @04:23AM
from the chill-guys-what's-with-the-aggression dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The first cooperative platooning competition, where vehicles use radio communication in addition to sensors, was held in Helmond, Holland a week ago. By using wireless communication the awareness range of each vehicle is extended, enabling vehicles to travel closer together which increases road capacity while at the same time avoiding the shockwave effects responsible for traffic jams. The Grand Cooperative Driving Challenge distinguishes itself from earlier platooning demos (e.g. the PATH project) by having a completely heterogeneous mix of vehicles and systems built by multiple researcher and student teams. Using wireless communication to coordinate vehicles raises concerns about the safety of such systems, would you trust WiFi to drive your car?"

I don't know about the US but where I live there is such a thing as a periodic maintenance checkup. They could make sensor checks and software updates mandatory. And the software can always transmit its year/version along with the data so that our car can disregard any data from outdated systems. But it's all moot until there's law that says car makers are not responsible for any crashes the software causes - because they won't ever dare sell you an automated car otherwise.

Everyday I travel by car, I feel this frustration that the car still needs me. Having to stop at traffic lights as the cars aren't synchronized and worrying that I might be distracted when the car in front of me brakes suddenly are only two of my gripes with driving the car myself.

A good start would be to synchronise the traffic lights, like they used to do.
Whatever happened to the 'Green Wave'? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_wave [wikipedia.org]
Oh I forgot, councils need to create congestion to justify workplace parking and congestion charges.

It's still used, but it's difficult to get right. The problem is that traffic lights are not just random obstructions on a road, as they are in the picture in the Wikipedia article, they are used for junctions or pedestrian crossings. In both cases, you can often avoid the light turning red at all if there are no people waiting to cross the road, but that breaks the wave at the next set of traffic lights. If it's a junction, then you have a bigger synchronisation problem, because there are multiple independent paths between two sets of lights, and defining a wave in one segment may decrease the overall efficiency.

When I was bored a few years ago, I wrote some code to try to define the optimal traffic light timings for a portion of Salt Lake City (where I was at the time - it has a very regular grid pattern, which makes it easy to model) to maximise total throughput. The results were quite counter intuitive (and very different to the traffic light timings that they were using).

Unfortunately, though, the signal controller is only aware of the sensor states at its given intersection, so in practice you have two results worse than simple sync'ed lights: a) whole lines of dozens of cars stopping and accelerating at each intersection due to the influence of single cars tripping sensors with low latency, and b) single cars stopped at intersections with high latency for multiple minutes where no cross traffic occurs. (Latency being the time it takes

The whole idea of this system is that it can be slowly phased in. The system looks at other cars with the system nearby and looks at their behavior. If a car somewhat in front of you is breaking, a signal is sent to the driver that something is about to happen. It is not really autonomous right now, but supporting the driver.

Answer: Lots and lots of money spent on legal cases with uncertain outcomes.

This is part of the reason why people say we should have one road for human drivers and one for automated (which makes them so prohibitively expensive, it's not worth it). Basically if there's an accident, the human "driver" of the vehicle is responsible, whether he was on cruise control or his ABS failed or whatever. You can still have that but with automated cars, I foresee instant-law-suit as soon as something like that happens (in the style of the Toyota lawsuits) blaming the car.

And on an all-automated road, if you have an accident then it's *GOT* to be the automation fault, right? So you think that the car companies and road companies are going to pick up the tab for the first 50-car multiple pile-up? What about the associated traffic delays for a thousand people driving their automated cars just behind? Again, it gets prohibitively expensive and risky for the car/road companies to operate.

If you have an automated car on a "human" road, then the human has to be able to take over (seeing as he is the one responsible in case of a crash!), so it becomes a little bit like cruise control and also becomes 100% the driver's problem, even if the automation fails.

More interesting - can you get arrested for something like "driving without due care and attention" if you're the driver of an automated vehicle and do something behind the wheel? If so (and current laws say "YES!"), you might as well just drive the damn thing yourself.

It's pretty much why these things are university projects and not actually on the road except in "tests" (and also things like the demonstration of two "crash-proof automated Volvo's a couple of months ago that, when aimed at each other head on at 30mph were supposed to stop before any possible accident - in front of the press they crashed about a dozen times and stopped once).

We've had the capability to remote-control and computer control a car for YEARS. Hell, we do it with aeroplanes and oil-tankers. But the fact of the matter is that we ALWAYS have a responsible human behind the wheel with the control to take over and, if they take their eyes off the controls, are deemed to be irresponsible (imagine if your airline pilot and his co-pilot both went to sleep and left it on auto?). The problem is that the law, economics and common-sense tell us it's a stupid thing to do.

You want an automated vehicle? Get on the London Docklands Light Railway. Entirely driver-less. But they had to put conductors on the trains to reassure passengers because occasionally the things get stuck and go wrong even though they are on rails. "a Passenger Service Agent (PSA), originally referred to as a "Train Captain", on each train is responsible for patrolling the train, checking tickets, making announcements and controlling the doors. PSAs can also take control of the train in certain circumstances including equipment failure and emergencies." Been in operation since 1987, can only travel on the rails, can't go past their stated safe speed, and you can have actual physical objects on the rails that activate brakes to avoid collisions and STILL they have a "driver".

Automated cars are like the "flying cars" of science fiction - yeah, it'd be cool, and we probably have the technology - but do you really want joy-riders flying over your house?

Sort of right. But when the benefits are large enough and obvious enough, a way is found (by changing law, if need be).

Self-driving cars are significantly awesomer than normal cars, and I strongly suspect that their advantage is sufficient to force the necessary changes.

Imagine what self-driving cars would do to DUI, to child-delivery, to parking-problems, to taxi-prices, to overnight long-distance driving, to commutes, to airport-parking-prices, to accidents-from-tiredness, to congestion.

What will happen is -some- place will allow them, and shortly thereafter people elsewhere will demand that they be allowed, with sufficient force that they will be. (and in this case, industry is on the same side: the car-industry wants to sell these, at a significant premium initially offcourse)

Sell one car that will last until breakdown, require special roads, special taxation, special infrastructure, special laws, huge investment, extreme legal risk, having to ride around even-more-patents, having every politician in your pocket, etc.

Or sell lots of cheaper cars that occasionally get dented/smashed up (but keep the driver intact of course), profit from the spare parts market (even if through patent licensing), require none of the above and where almost all the risk is on the driver.

The car market is already over-priced and struggling (i.e. the ENTIRE UK car market had to be bailed out by the government just a few years ago, and it's not the first time). The governments already spend billions on road infrastructure (where a road is a bit of tarmac with some paint on it, not an isolated, obstruction-free, electronically-enabled, few-travellers, risky multi-billion-dollar venture) and, believe it or not, serious road accidents are actually rare given the number of cars in the road (multiply the number of air-accidents by the difference between the number of planes journeys and the number of cars journeys world-wide and see what happens!).

Additionally, human drivers speeding and parking in the wrong places etc. is actually a HUGE source of income (not to mention drivers licenses, driving schools, insurance, etc.). Until the economics vastly change, it ain't gonna happen. If we see it in my lifetime, I will be hugely impressed at the amount of administrative and economic crap we've had to remove to get to that point. And to be honest, I don't particularly want it either.

- FUCK NO - pulling over takes less time than than it would to fiddle for the device. I only know of a handful of roads where you're not allowed to pull over in my entire countries (so-called "red routes" which invariably join to lots and lots of other roads where you can do just that - motorways have a hard shoulder and services for a reason).

- Taxi

Amazing things, taxis. Been around for centuries. Damn sight cheaper than buying an entire automated vehicle for such one-off e

Taxis are neither cheap, nor -nearly- as awesome as you make them out to be, and for this reason a tiny fraction of human transport happens by taxi (especially outside city-centres).

Taxis amount to using one human being and a car to transport another human being. (or more, but a large fraction of taxi-rides are single) If that human being is paid the same you are, then because of things like VAT and taxes, it ends up being significantly MORE expensive to let a taxi do it, than to do it yourself.

Not to mention talk on your cellphone without guilt, put the finishing touches on your last minute presentation on the way to work, drive all night on a road trip and still get a good night's sleep, and NO MORE TRAFFIC JAMS, the true bane of the modern commuter's life.

Basically if there's an accident, the human "driver" of the vehicle is responsible, whether he was on cruise control or his ABS failed or whatever.

Usually thats the case, but if there is a proven defect with the car(see the Toyota case last year) then the car company is responsible. However PROVING that it was the car is another battle altogether.

That was a (non-existent) "brake defect" where the drivers claimed they weren't able to brake. Not one case was proved in court where this was the case, to my knowledge. But, damn expensive for Toyota to prove otherwise, I should think.

However, an ABS failure, for instance, wouldn't necessarily be the car's fault as the device only operates when the car is skidding anyway (read: driver error). And cruise-control is a human-activated switch that warns against it's use and that doesn't excuse you from cont

We've had the capability to remote-control and computer control a car for YEARS.

We've had remote-control for over a century. Nikola Tesla made a remote-controlled toy boat in 1898.For computer-control, it's somewhere around five or six decades.

Automated cars are like the "flying cars" of science fiction - yeah, it'd be cool, and we probably have the technology - but do you really want joy-riders flying over your house?

Just like for airplanes, flight would very likely be restricted to air corridors over mostly low- and unpopulated areas.Radar has been around for three-quarters of a century, and would likely be installed on tall chimneys and radio towers, partially for warning systems, partially for detecting off-limit flight.So yes, the occasional/rare joyrider

This is part of the reason why people say we should have one road for human drivers and one for automated (which makes them so prohibitively expensive, it's not worth it).

It's not worth it if you spend the money to build an actual road which is expensive and space-consuming. It may be worth it in dense urban areas to build PRT, and then provide incentives to use it (or incentives against auto use, of course.)

Three simple words. No fault insurance. In the event of an accident, your insurance covers your car and your injuries. There are no legal battles, because everyone is responsible for insuring themselves. They do this where I live. If you decide not to drive with insurance, then you aren't covered, regardless of whether or not the accident is your fault.

Government funded healthcare goes a long way to cover medical expenses. Also, I'm a big fan of being responsible for your own mishaps. You can get (term) life insurance or injury insurance for yourself if you're really that worried about being hit by a car. Sure in the very rare event that somebody hits you with a car, while walking, it would be nice to get some money out of them, but you can't really bank on that, as a lot of the bad drivers out there have no insurance/license anyway, and probably not mu

Well, for starters those sane laws you mention are usually just the traffic code, so those would apply equally. If a car doesn't yield when it has to then it doesn't make a difference if it was driven by a computer or a human driver.

So probably no difference when it comes to other responsibility towards other drivers.

Most interesting questions:

- Would it be OK to be drunk in a fully computer driven car? (where the driver seat is just occupied by a passenger)
- Would it be OK for someone without a driven license to use one of these cars?
- In case of accident, assuming the computer was driving, do car owners take a hit in their driving license if they have one?
- If the car is a rental or loan, how's the responsibility divided between car owner / insurance company / car driver / etc?
- While we are at it, if cars are really able to drive themselves, do they actually need to have a human passenger at all? Can I send my car to my mom's to pick something up and come back?

Anyway, obviously self driving cars would have a shitload of system getting data from external sensors, so it would actually be easier to find out exactly what happened in case of accident, particularly if more than one car is involved and you have two sets of data to compare.

About mixing human and computer drivers, I'm not worried about it. I have no reason to believe that if the guy in the next lane is driving drunk and suddenly steers towards me I would have a better chance of solving it than a computer. I'd say the computer would actually react faster and with better control than I would. Sometimes accidents are inevitable by the way, and under some external circumstances there's no way at all to prevent them (even if you could replay the thing over and over). If I'm involved in one, I prefer to make sure its effects are minimized by a computer that knows what its doing.

Well, for starters those sane laws you mention are usually just the traffic code, so those would apply equally. If a car doesn't yield when it has to then it doesn't make a difference if it was driven by a computer or a human driver.

IMO, this won't work. The car manufacturer would always end up getting sued (probably by all involved parties), and they're not going to sell self-driving cars in those circumstances. You'd have to have a separate road (no human-driven cars in the mix), with legislation in place that basically says you/your insurance is responsible for yourself, no matter what happens.

If car-people had the slightest awareness of their environment then they might actually choose to live somewhere near to public transportation and then we wouldn't need automated road-trains like this.

But car-people are irrational and can only talk of their "freedom" to cause and sit in traffic jams.

If car-people had the slightest awareness of their environment then they might actually choose to live somewhere near to public transportation and then we wouldn't need automated road-trains like this.

But car-people are irrational and can only talk of their "freedom" to cause and sit in traffic jams.

Agreed. If car-people were rational they would just follow the traffic regulations that exist in most places that say the left lane is for passing and traffic jams would be much reduced.

Traffic jams and too many accidents are caused by left lane hogs. Unfortunately, these people seem to believe the road is theirs alone as long as they do not exceed the speed limit. They classify any driver behind them as a "tailgater" who should be treated with contempt. They never stop to think that the ultimate cause of m

If someone is driving in the "overtaking lane" at the speed limit, how can you legally get close enough to tail gate them?

The speedometers could have a small difference, while still being both within legal calibration limits. Maybe the guy in front has older tyres, that would translate to a slower speed at a given speedometer reading, because the circumference of a tyre decreases with wear. But why he's going faster than you is none of your business. Yes, he could be overspeeding, so what?

That's the big problem with left lane hogs, they think they are responsible for law enforcement, while they ignore that their own attitude

I live in front of a bus stop and I work at 6km from home (bird distance).

These 6km bird distance are 6.4 km by car or 9.6 km by bicycle going thru very dangerous streets for a cyclist. 3 days over the 5 days of the week I can't take a bicycle due to my sport activities and the equipment I must take with me.

With my car it take me 15 min (with traffic jam) in the morning to go to work and 7 min to go back from work or 15 min to go back from my sport activities.With the bus it take me 10 min (with traffic jam

Using coloured lights and human eyesight to coordinate vehicles raises concerns about the safety of such systems, would you trust Joe Sixpack to drive your car?

Humans are fallible, and hundreds die on the road every day. Would we accept a computer system that causes hundreds of people to die? Of course not. So any computer system that's considered capable of driving a car will almost certainly be safer than a human driver. Probably a thousand times safer.

True indeed, but this seems like closing the stable door well after the horse has bolted. Although, to your credit, the airline industry seems to take the same line for finding the real edge case bugs.

So who is responsible after the first driver is killed? I have always thought programmers need insurance.....

Using Holland to mean the whole country is widely accepted usage, also in the Netherlands. Some people from outside of the two Holland provinces (and also some pedantics, and Belgians) have a misplaced sense of inferiority and dislike it when you call them part of Holland.

Anyway, I'm happy to Netherlands is at least putting some effort in to get to automated driving. With my skills, if I drive myself I will be dead within the day by some stupidity.

TFA doesn't make it entirely clear but it seems like the radio network isn't critical to the cars safe driving. It supplies additional information that they can use to optimise their driving, but ultimately the car's own sensors take precedence in all safety related matters.

Of more concern than loss of signal is the potential for hacking. People have already demonstrated accessing a car's wireless sensors for things like tyre pressure on high end models. It is difficult to validate data coming from other ve

Cars are these strange things that drive our minds crazy. I don't know how much is cultural (i.e. movies, etc.) and how much is psychological, but there are few areas in life where the disconnect between reality and subjective is so dramatic.

Everyone thinks he's an above-average driver. Of course, that's statistically impossible.Almost everyone overestimates his (or her) ability to handle a car in unusual circumstances.Very few people can correctly judge road and weather conditions and their impacts on things like brake distance.Most people do not have a correct sense of speed anymore if they've driven at speed for a few hours.

and so on and so forth. Car accidents are within the top reasons of unnatural death in most western countries, but most of us feel more uneasy going on a rollercoaster (which cause what, a dozen or so deaths a year, world-wide?) or on a plane (around 1000 deaths per year, world-wide) than taking the car to work (1,200,000 deaths per year, world-wide). Yes, that's the real numbers, here [planecrashinfo.com] and here [autoblog.com] are some sources, or google your own. Plane crashes fall way below the rounding error margin of car crashes.

Really, you would have to put really bad engineers with pre-historic computer equipment and unstable wiring into those cars to make them worse than human drivers.

Actually, I'd prefer the computer, if only for the comfort level. I don't especially enjoy driving, and knowing that all the cars are computer-controlled would give us one massive advantage: Predictability. Humans are easy to predict in groups, but very hard to predict individually. And erratic reactions to minor events is one of the reasons the roads are as busy and unsafe as they are.

It's not really psychological, it's a side-effect of how humans assess risk. We assess a risk lower if it is: common (driving every day), self-controlled (driving yourself), failures aren't personified (hitting a tree is a different risk than a person driving into you), and if we've seen the event a lot. We assess risks higher if they are: rare (many people only fly once or less per year), something you can't control (someone else piloting), and if failures are spectacular (fireball from the sky). Add in be

Aren't those statistics only meaningful if everyone drives, flies, and rides roller coasters in equal amounts?

You can play with those numbers all you like, because of course they can not be compared directly. But we are not talking about a few minor differences, we are talking about more than three orders of magnitude.

It seems to me that fatalities per hour of would be a more useful comparison.

Or per mile, or per trip, or, or, or - as I said, yes you can do various math to make the numbers somehow comparable. They are not. The magnitude matters, though.

You forget that your artificial example is just that. In a population of any reasonable size, we can assume (unless you have evidence to the contrary) that driving abilities will at least roughly follow a bell curve. It's like that with most other skills measured, so unless we have actual reasons to believe otherwise, driving abilities are probably much the same.

Or, if you want a pure math answer: The Median would not change in your above ex

Quite. Several of them actually make it worse. Please note: In several occasions we've had troops in ACTIVE COMBAT OPERATIONS with lower fatality rates than the same number of troops, statistically, would have at home commuting. (The first Gulf War was estimated to have saved several hundred American lives, and there's been, I think, entire years of the current conflict where its been about break-even.) If you're not a soldier who participates in active combat operations, or have one of a very few othe

Could work, but surely if it was such a big deal placing blame someone would have mandated this. No idea about the stats, but I'd guess there aren't that many unexplained car crashes?

With airplanes, they don't crash so often, and it's good to have an explanation for each crash. I suppose this has something to do with the perception of danger and the length of the dev process. With cars, the debris isn't as scattered, there's more crashes, and the fix can be implemented more swiftly.

It has been said that by knowing how traffic waves are created, drivers can sometimes reduce their effects by increasing vehicle headways and reducing the use of brakes, ultimately alleviating traffic congestion for everyone in the area.

I've been doing this as routine behavior for almost 30 years now, after observing these "waves" and theorizing the causes. I've been setting an example how to stop the waves (if not the jams altogether)... not that anyone recognizes the point of what I'm doing. Can't explain it to them! They just think I'm trying to piss them off, being lazy or not paying attention.

That last is really why traffic jams occur, so taking the controls away from humans and giving it to machines that always pay attention, and thus know what to do and when to do it, is a good thing.

It's useless. One driver alone can't make a difference in the "wave" and there aren't enough "clued-in" drivers to get the critical mass needed.Even if there were enough drivers to break the wave on a given section of the road, how long do you think it'd take for the guys on the back to restart it? At a given concentration of cars on a stretch of road, the waves are self-forming and inevitable.

In the end, all you're doing is making the people behind you go even slower because the guys on the other lane see

There are no "jam-causing people", there are only "jam-reducing people", i.e., the GP.That's to say, they are the exception.

The mechanism which causes the "waves" is a direct result of normal human driving. The only way you'll get rid of a jam by letting others pass you, is if you wait long enough that the jam disappears on its own.

The problem is not that the WiFi might or might not be secure. The problem is that the basic premise of the system is to trust data send by random unknown cars. What happens if a malicious car sends false informations?

I believe there is an Audi concept car that does, if I remember correctly, by using google. The car gets data about weather conditions, not to mention road and traffic conditions from google. If your car veers into the opposite lane, the steering will be adjusted to bring you back to your lane. I believe it was a concept car, and was being test driven by Car and Driver or Motor trend, one of those magazines. I remember reading about the driver trying out that particular

Unable to RTFA (server not responding), but seriously? They _can't_ be talking about actually using 2.4GHz ISM band, _unlicensed_ spectrum, full of all kinds of crap that you have to accept, to build even a supplimental safety system. That's just the submitter putting a generic name to "wireless communication", right? *boggle*

I have often thought it will only be a matter of time before our Cars would have access to other cars habits.If enough cars were fitted with its own GPS systems, and these systems recorded its average movement, this information could then be shared to other cars with in its vicinity, share not only its average commuter information but the average commuter information that it has gathered for other cars around it too.

Basically a tether of info, ideal for rush hour traffic. The GPS systems can then take all t

In my personal experience speed limits on highways make people that are too nervous and shouldn't be driving on them to begin with feel safer, and able to drive on them. My mother is a prime example of this. She either shouldn't have a license or should be restricted to roads with a speed limit of 60km/h or less. She's way too nervous and in a serious event simply can't react fast enough.

I had to save both our asses from rear-ending a dump truck that twisted off its u-joint and stopped abruptly as the drive